Islam and violence

By the time he came up with the idea of bombing a Taylor Swift concert, Beran Aliji’s young life had completely broken down. In July, amid a self-described mental crisis, the 19-year-old Austrian abruptly quit his job as a factory apprentice and isolated himself in his apartment, obsessing, as he later told police, about his own death.

With no money or prospects, and in lieu of close friendships, he began to immerse himself in a virtual world of violent videos and secret chatrooms devoted to the Islamic State. According to phone records seized by police, he began looking to the extremist group first for inspiration and then for practical advice about planning an attack.

A decade ago, the whole of France seemed to unite in support of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly that had fallen victim to Islamist terrorism.

“Je suis Charlie” T-shirts and banners were everywhere. More than four million people joined marches in support of the magazine across the country. And François Hollande, the Socialist president of the day, promised to defend freedom of expression in the name of the caricaturists and writers among the 12 victims of the attack.

It has not worked out that way, at least according to Charlie Hebdo’s surviving journalists. “During this past decade, the French left has beaten all the records of cowardice and denial,” wrote Laurent Sourisseau, known as Riss, the cartoonist and director of Charlie Hebdo, who was injured in the 2015 attack.

Every year around Christmas time, Islamic jihadis take the opportunity to victimize Christians on or around one of the holiest days of the Church year. The international media and global “human rights” organizations generally take little or no notice, as they operate according to a paradigm in which Christians are always white oppressors and Muslims are always brown victims. Any story that doesn’t fit that narrative is swiftly consigned to the memory hole. And so as in other years, these stories got little notice, and the global jihad against Christians and Christianity continues virtually unopposed.

On Boxing Day, Nigel Farage was describing Elon Musk as “a bloody hero” and confirming that he was expecting a “reasonable-sized donation” from the billionaire to Reform UK.

Barely a week later, Mr Musk’s love-in with Mr Farage’s party is looking a little awkward. Mr Musk, who began the day accusing Sir Keir Starmer of failing to go after grooming gangs, ended it by calling for the release of the far-Right activist Tommy Robinson, who was jailed in October for contempt of court for repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee.

Mr Musk retweeted posts describing Robinson as a “political prisoner” and separately said: “Britain needs Reform now!”

If the New Year’s Day massacre in the Big Easy doesn’t wake us up to the horrors of Islamism, nothing will.

‘Bring the intifada home!’, cried Ivy League radicals throughout 2024. Well, here it is. On the bloodstained, wreckage-strewn streets of New Orleans. In the shattered limbs of the injured, the extinguished promise of the dead. The very Islamist violence that the West’s woke influencers have been making excuses for, have been glorifying as ‘resistance’, have openly praised from the safety of their leafy campuses, has now struck at the heart of America’s own Big Easy. Is this what you wanted?